John – Darker than dark

As for me…well how to begin. Change of life? Tired of life? Tired of being so lonely? Tired of the world and/or all the hate I feel emanating from it? Maybe a mixture of it all and more. If not for C.Q. (Chris Davis), I believe I would of gone mad already.

I express loneliness such as, talking to a guard whether male or female, and yet though you want to feel like they are your friends, they are not. Nor do they want to be. It is like 95% or more of the people in here. It is false. It is just a person trying to get through their job. Whether from trying to stay awake, stay safe or making another paycheck. The talks are just a falseness that must be endured to at least feel some sanity. So it is with inmates. Most all the inmates here if turned loose would never go find another they done time with, (exception: Unless they lived in the same hood, town or country county and knew each other.) Other than that it is a shared time, to help each other at least to some degree feel wanted. Yet, when you really think of such, it is depressing, due to the fact, “it is fake!” So then the loneliness sets in even deeper.

You ask yourself, “why do I try so hard when it seems I am doing nothing?” What semblance of life do I really have?

No one knows the true you. All they see or want to see is what your charge is. What your disciplinary record is. They don’t see the dying love inside dying like a dying ember in a cold fire, soon to be blown away in the cold December wind.

I feel like a tumbleweed, just tumbling across an unchanging scene. And yet it is. Unchangeable that is. North, South, East West and up…all white. Down…flat gray. All directions of the compass never change. Like chasing the Northern sky across an infinite sea with nothing but darkness as your mate.

How many times I have rode freight trains and lived alone on those rails or on highways, back country blue topped roads. And yet I never felt this alone.

I realize it was because at least out there, a person has nature as a friend. In here a person has only self. No one cares if you arise in the morning. They do not care that you have passed or gone. Memories fade quickly in here. Each person doing time in their own way, trying to tell self, “I am a human being deserving of better. To be loved.” But ostracized due to a mistake made. Yes some mistakes made were huge. Yet, out of rashness, drug or alcohol or even mental inducement they made a mistake.

Others with the only mistake of trusting others. With that they spend the rest of their lives confined for a crime not committed. All they have lost because of lies. Though it does no good to blame. For what will complaining or pointing fingers solve. They will I tell you, make you old fast. They’ll drive you crazy thinking of what might have been, or what could be, yet again knowing a hard cold slab will be the place you take your last breath. One day or one night you’ll be found lying there with no life left in you. Alone behind a steel door surrounding by four unforgiven concrete block, cold walls.

But what does it matter then. You will never have a recollection of what happened or how you passed. In fact everything you ever thought, dreamed, heard, seen, tasted, felt, learned, will be gone never to be done again. Its like taking a book of History and throwing it into an incinerator. It’s gone. So is life – my life is a book, was a book, but one day will be a book no more. So… – “Are words written but never read, still words?”